1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a semiconductor device and an operating method thereof, and more particularly to a semiconductor device capable of testing a semiconductor memory device while the semiconductor memory device is in operation and an operating method thereof.
2. Related Art
Normal Built-In Self-Test (BIST) operations are performed by writing test data having a predetermined pattern in a semiconductor memory device, reading the data from the semiconductor memory device corresponding to the test data and comparing the read data and the test data.
The BIST operations according to the prior art require additional space to store the test data used for testing. Moreover since the BIST operations according to the prior art should be performed before a semiconductor memory device is installed in a system. Therefore, it was impossible to test a semiconductor memory device while the semiconductor memory device was in operation, and it was impossible to find errors or handle errors that occurred while the semiconductor memory device was being used in the system.